Conclusion

My focus on the body has uncovered numerous strategies that postrevolutionary state actors employed to assimilate indigenous peoples. Modernity became, at its core, an embodied condition. Racial, genetic, cultural, and technological hybridity represented different incarnations of an official mestizaje that understood race to mean something more than a characteristic inherited at birth. Officialist thinkers ranging from letrados like Vasconcelos and Gamio to artists and filmmakers like Emilio Fernández and the muralists held that people could modernize their bodies and assimilate to the state through technological hybridity. Given the prominence of the diverse voices that championed state-sanctioned racial doctrines—and particularly since their work permeated the nation’s intellectual, artistic, and popular sectors—it is of no surprise that twentieth-century representations of racial and technological hybridity remain very much alive in the popular imaginary.

Painting Mestizaje in a New Light

This chapter analyzes the state-funded murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, two artists who served as de facto mouthpieces for the state as they trumpeted the postrevolutionary tenets of official mestizaje through their work. Despite sharing the state’s seal of approval, the two men communicated contradictory racial discourses as they disagreed about the proper place of the nation’s European and indigenous heritage within the official ideology. That said, both men’s work was pro-mestizo despite the fact that they conceived mixed-race identity in very different ways. Orozco’s understanding of racial and technological hybridity tended toward hispanismo as he constantly validated the result—if not the means—of the Spanish conquest. Unlike Orozco, Rivera carefully separated European science—which he celebrated—from the cosmology that had permitted the destruction of thousands of indigenous lives. Instead, he posited an essentialistic indigenous spirit that would redeem mestizo Mexico from the conquering nature it had inherited from its European progenitors. This paternalistic understanding of indigeneity led to an indigenista discourse that became the favored paradigm of official mestizaje throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Science and the (Meta)Physical Body

Chapter 1 discusses José Vasconcelos’s notion of a cosmic race through a posthuman reading of his seminal essay The Cosmic Race [La raza cósmica] (1925) and his largely forgotten play Prometeo vencedor (1916?). Because Vasconcelos and his Ateneo colleagues were all famously antipositivist, they were suspicious of scientific discourses that purported to hold a monopoly on the “truth.” However, they also lived in a twentiethcentury society in which scientific discourse had gained intellectual hegemony. My chapter begins by asserting science as one of many discourses that compose Vasconcelos’s philosophy of Aesthetic Monism, which subordinates human knowledge to an overriding aesthetic imperative. Afterwards I use a close reading of Prometeo vencedor to assert the key role of science—especially in the guise of technology—in establishing both a worldwide mestizo society and a spiritual, posthuman superation of the body.

Introduction

One key to race formation within postrevolutionary Mexico was the tie between miscegenation and modernity. On the one hand, mestizaje represented the elimination of ethnicity because it resulted from interracial fusion. On the other hand, it became a distinct racial identity that stood in opposition to the indigenous. State officials believed that a prerequisite to modernization was the transformation of Amerindian individuals into mestizos, and they aimed to achieve this end through a process of race formation that used technology to modernize the indigenous body and transform it into a mestizo entity. Mexican society associates a person’s racial identity with his or her ties to modernity. Throughout this study I look at an array of literary and cultural production that shows that Mexican people become racially and culturally coded as mestizo as they assimilate to the modernity-driven state through the use of technology.

Colonizing Resistance

This chapter discusses two venues that continued to debate the relationship between modernity, technological hybridity, and mestizaje as the postrevolutionary state began to lose credibility during the 1960s. It focuses primarily on El Santo’s Mexploitation cinema and on Carlos Olvera’s novel Mejicanos en el espacio (1968). The novel satirizes statist discourses while the movies (ironically) support mestizo nationalism. Due in part to a desire to placate the censors, the directors of lucha libre cinema validated statist ideals of mestizaje and modernity. El Santo played an authentically Mexican, mestizo superhero who defended the nation against both the threat of external empire—symbolized by aliens and foreign mad scientists—and from the specters of the indigenous past. El Santo thus asserted mestizo Mexico’s right to colonize its indigenous population while also resisting foreign attempts to meddle in the country. Olvera’s novel belongs to the countercultural onda movement, and it deconstructs and ridicules official discourses that justified internal empire. It imagines a 22nd century Centroméjico that attempts to assert its modernity by mimicking the imperial behavior of nations like the US. The novel ultimately suggests that the mestizo drive for empire validates global hierarchies of power that marginalize Mexico.

Emilio Fernández, Gabriel Figueroa, and the Race for Mexico’s Body

This chapter looks at an especially interesting articulation of the posthuman within the indigenista films of Emilio “El Indio” Fernández. It identifies an attempt to modernize indigenous peasants by exposing their bodies to modern medicine. The chapter views these films in the context of Roberto Esposito’s “immunization paradigm,” a biopolitical theory that compares the medical process of immunization to the state’s role of subject creation. When a people lacks a natural immunity to a vice (improper performativity of race and gender in the case of these films), a new actor, such as the state, must step in and provide an artificial immunity. Using this theoretical framework, the chapter analyzes the films Río Escondido (1947), María Candelaria (1944), Enamorada (1946), and The Torch (1950). The readings suggest that we approach these films as allegories for a postrevolutionary society where immunological discourses prescribe appropriate gender and racial performativity for the nation.